Dolly Parton – Little Sparrow

Dolly Parton could have taken her plaque in the Country Music Hall of Fame and gone home to count her money, accepting the judgment of the marketplace that her career was no longer of interest. She could have (perhaps then her private life would cease to be of interest to the supermarket tabloids), and her place in history would have been secure.

Instead, she has proven to be the rarest of figures, a singer and songwriter who became a superstar yet retained the skills and impulses of a serious, seriously driven artist. This singular accomplishment is almost without precedent (who else makes the list?). Her last three albums, not counting the long-shelved Trio II, stand quite comfortably among the best works of her long and storied career.

With 1999’s The Grass Is Blue, she turned to the traditional bluegrass sounds of her mountain upbringing and offered a stunning reminder of how powerful a singer she can be when challenged by fellow musicians and solid material. Her follow-up, Little Sparrow, makes two somewhat divergent cases for her art. If The Grass Is Blue embraced the hard bluegrass sounds of, say, the Del McCoury Band, Little Sparrow veers more toward the smooth, cocktail bluegrass of IIIrd Tyme Out, though the supporting musicians are largely the same. (Well, she’s always had a taste for schmaltz; witness those Kenny Rogers duets.)

The other component of Little Sparrow picks up the challenge Steve Earle laid down with The Mountain, and adds a handful of brilliant new compositions to the bluegrass canon. And so, while she redeems Steve Young’s “Seven Bridges Road” (a hit for the detestable Eagles), swings gamely at Cole Porter’s “I Get A Kick Out Of You”, and flat kills Autry Inman’s gorgeous bluegrass story-song, “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby”, it is the second half of the disc that really stops one dead in the tracks.

Three songs in a row, all Dolly Parton originals — “Mountain Angel”, “Marry Me”, and “Down From Dover” — thoroughly refocus the album. They are all classically written songs of love (realized and not), sung with extraordinary vitality. “Down From Dover” has the pathos and vitality of an ageless British Isles ballad, while “Marry Me” is delivered with all the sass of a teenager.

Part of the secret is that Parton has surrounded herself with first-cabin musicians whose joy has not been eroded by regular session work. She also supplements her still-startling voice with backing vocals from Alison Krauss, Dan Tyminski, Claire Lynch, Rhonda and Darrin Vincent, Sonya Isaacs and Becky Isaacs Bowman, Rebecca Lynn Howard, and Maura O’Connell.

But most of the secret is Dolly herself, who remains both thoroughly exposed and utterly hidden. The cleavage and the wigs and the jokes mask a consummate businesswoman, and the steely entrepreneur masks an artist of extraordinary skill and astonishing vitality.